How to read a book

This instruction is for readers who read for information
and understanding, not just for entertainment, and it is
based on book of Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren: How to Read
a Book. Revised and Updated Edition. Simon & Schuster 1972. All text
marked with quotation marks is from that book.

Introduction to active reading

The reading should be active since information does not just move
from the teacher to the student but the student must think and find
connection to his own knowledge in order to understand. Books can be
considered teachers that are absent since the student cannot ask
anything from the teacher if he does not understand. Goal of reading
can be increasing information (remembering), increasing understanding
(enlightment), and entertainment.

There are four kinds of reading: Elementary
reading is what the schools teach for
pupils. Inspectional reading is the next level of
reading and has two parts: systematic skimming of the text and
superficial reading. Inspectional reading tells if you should choose
this book or maybe some other book is more suitable for you. In the
skimming phase, the title page of a book is examined (what is the
scope or goal of the book), and table of content (what it contains)
and index (how wide is it) is checked. Scan through a chapter that
seems to be essential for the topic. The superficial reading phase
suites well for difficult books: the book is read through without
stopping to the difficult parts that are not understood. This helps
understanding in the second reading because something is already
familiar and the human brains can connect new things to the familiar
things more easily - seeing the forest from the threes. Third kind of
reading is analytical
reading and it is the topic of this instruction. Fourth
kind of reading is syntopical reading where the
reader construct an analysis beyond the book(s).

How to prevent falling asleep while reading? Active reading helps:
"ask questions while you read - questions that you yourself must try
to answer in the course of reading". Adler and Van Doren give four
main questions: "What is the book about as a whole?, What is being
said in detail, and how?, Is the book true, in whole or part?, What of
it?" (more about these later). Another mean for active reading is
drawing markings. Of course, you cannot do that with library
books. Good ways to mark (own) books are underlinging, vertical lines
at the margin, stars, asterisks or others in margin, numbers in the
margin, circling of key words or sentences, and writing in the margins
of the page. Do not mark the library books or other loaned books!
Third way for active reading is writing notes while reading. Notes can
be structural, conceptual, and dialectical.

Reading should be a habit, and for making it to be a habit, Adler
and Van Doren have given set of rules
for analytical reading. When you have developed a habit of
reading, you can forget these separated rules. The rules are not given
in cronological order, and several of them can be fulfilled with one
single reading.

Same as in case of dictionaries, facts can be looked from a
encyclopedia in four ways: Facts that does not require explanations
("facts are propositions"). An encyclopedia can report opinions but
they should be clearly stated ("facts are 'true' propositions") and
thus things that does not have clear consensus cannot be found from
(traditional) encyclepedias and can be vague in a 'new' encyclopedia.
Facts can be informational singulars or relatively unquestioned
generalizations. ("facts are reflections of reality") i.e. "facts are
not ideas or concepts, nor are they theories in the sense of being mere
speculations about reality". Facts can change and they are culturally
determined ("facts are to some extent conventional").

Sources and Acknowledgements

This page is based on a book titled "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer
J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.